Could somebody please explain to me how Marvel could subtract itself from the main Previews catalogue and still not leave it any shorter? The damn thing is almost as long as it was before Marvel Previews spun off, and longer than it was at this time last year. How exactly does the removal of one of the two biggest publishers in comics not result in any space saved? Is there some sort of abstruse physical law governing the mass of comics and crapola catalogues of which I have not been informed? I must know. Brainy people: Please write your answer on the back of a copy of BIG NUMBERS #2 and send it to me c/o Ninth Art. Remember, show your work!

Sorry for whining. It's just that I can't remember trawling through so much before with so little to show for it. Not that there aren't plenty of worthy books here, it's just that they're buried a little deeper. On the plus side, that means a relatively short column this time around, which I could use just as much as I'm sure you all could.

As an added bonus: absolutely nothing herein about the end of CrossGen as we knew it. I'll just limit myself to saying that I can't understand all the schadenfreude that's been aimed at the company since the "restructuring" announcement, but that's mainly because I can't understand CrossGen inspiring strong feelings in anybody one way or the other.

Onward:

DARK HORSE

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF THE ESCAPIST #1, by Michael Chabon, Howard Chaykin, and various artists
OCT03 0014, pg. 18, $8.95

If you've read THE ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY, Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the so-called "Golden Age" of comics, you'll recognise The Escapist as the superhero character Kavalier and Clay created. This here is an 80-page anthology comic starring him, played straight. I don't know if it will work, for several reasons - The Escapist is an intentionally generic character; the trend of retro superheroics has been getting tapped out lately (see TOM STRONG); and Chabon's prose in the novel, which was densely packed with information, wouldn't seem to lend itself to comics. But it will be an interesting experiment, and if nothing else, it's gotten Howard Chaykin writing and drawing comics again (for the first time in seven years, says the solicitation).

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF TONY MILLIONAIRE'S SOCK MONKEY, VOL. 3 & 4, by Tony Millionaire OCT03 0333, pg. 29, $12.95

More creepy Victorian-style storybooks-gone-wrong from Millionaire.

STRIP SEARCH, by various OCT03 0037, pg. 31, $14.95

An anthology of newcomers' strips that Dark Horse solicited through a contest on their website last year.

HELLBOY JUNIOR, by Bill Wray, Mike Mignola, and various
OCT03 0023, pg. 24, $14.95

Eager to squeeze all the juice they can out of Mignola's creation before the movie comes out, Dark Horse collects this extremely goofy series about Hellboy as a tot, growing up in the netherworld. It's a bit like HELLBOY filtered through REN & STIMPY, if you can imagine that.

DC COMICS / KYLE BAKER PUBLISHING

PLASTIC MAN #1, by Kyle Baker
OCT03 0256, pg. $2.50

KYLE BAKER: CARTOONIST, by Kyle Baker
OCT03 2564, pg. 328, $14.95

I hate describing a comic as a "movie on paper", but with Kyle Baker it's become unavoidable. I DIE AT MIDNIGHT and YOU ARE HERE were action movies on paper, KING DAVID was a Disney movie on paper, and Baker's PLASTIC MAN is, from the look of things, a Chuck Jones Warner Bros cartoon on paper. DC describes this as "a perfect pairing of character and creator", but I'm not convinced. Fans of Jack Cole's original PLASTIC MAN (among whom Art Spiegelman can be counted) tend to argue that the stories work best when played with something of a straight face. Baker seems to have gone in for unrelieved zaniness. At the very least, I think it was a mistake to draw the normal human characters with limbs no less bandy than those of Plas' himself. Besides which, Baker's still cutting too many corners on his artwork. True, his PLASTIC MAN looks a good deal less slapdash than his work on TRUTH for Marvel, but that's not saying much.

Much more to my taste is KYLE BAKER: CARTOONIST, precisely because it can't be described as a movie on paper. Instead, it's a collection of gag cartoons, including 40 pages of THE BAKERS, an autobiographical domestic-comedy strip. The sample pages on his website are funny, and the Previews ad, done in a faux-upscale style ("Elegant. Sophisticated. Expensive.") is even funnier. It restores my faith in the guy.

This is Baker's first major release as a self-publisher, and to prove that he's serious about it, he's got two graphic novels planned for the coming months; a biography of Nat Turner, a Virginian slave who led a bloody revolt in 1831, and a piece of fiction called MY SPECIAL PAIN. Excellent. This isn't quite the best comics news I've heard in the past month - that would be Fantagraphics' forthcoming COMPLETE PEANUTS collections - but it runs a close second.

DC COMICS

THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
OCT03 0205, pg. 103, $19.95

The anti-sequel to the vastly overrated DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. This is the softcover edition, so though the joke is still at the reader's expense, that expense is now lessened by about 10 bucks. Still, this isn't the perfect format - ideally, this comic should have been mimeographed, printed on newsprint, and hand-coloured with Magic Marker.

VERTICAL, by Steven Seagle & Mike Allred
OCT03 0307, pg. 119, $4.95

This is all Vertigo has that's new, this month. The gimmick is that it's half as wide as a normal comic book, but is twice as tall when opened, since it's stapled at the top. It's about a guy named Brando Bale, "a handsome 21-year-old daredevil riddled with cuts and bruises and a mysterious past that compels him to leap off the world's tallest structures in an attempt to find answers to the big questions". Um. Has he considered reading, maybe, or travel?

It's set in the early '60s and the plot involves Andy Warhol and pop art, so it was inevitable that it would be drawn by Mike Allred. Only problem is, judging by the cover, his Brando isn't visibly "riddled with cuts and bruises." Furthermore, neither he nor his girl, Zilly Kane (ghod, those names!), look more than slightly rumpled, even though they appear to have jumped off the Empire State Building. I'm sceptical of this one, not least because the script is described as "groovy."

Meanwhile, though Vertigo is largely dormant, WildStorm is teeming with books, even though they mostly sell lousy. There's THE AUTHORITY/LOBO CHRISTMAS SPECIAL by Keith Giffen, giving you two dead jokes for the price of one. There's MASKS: TOO HOT FOR TV by half of WildStorm's stable, a COPS-style comedy take on the daily routine of superheroes, which is not exactly the freshest of ideas. Ed Brubaker's thriller SLEEPER, one of those that reviewers love and nobody buys, is ending, but is getting a trade paperback and should eventually see a second 'season'. ASTRO CITY/ARROWSMITH collects the 8-page prelude stories of Kurt Busiek's series and fills the other half of the book with padding. There's some fantasy novel or other that's been turned into a hardcover graphic novel, the art for which has not been gussied up quite enough to hide its essential mediocrity. Oh, and there's more THUNDERCATS. Joy.

And then, from America's Best Comics, there's, well:

AMERICA'S BEST COMICS, by Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Peter Hogan and various
OCT03 0292, pg. 117, $17.95

An odds 'n' sods collection, containing the AMERICA'S BEST COMICS 64-PAGE GIANT, the ABC SKETCHBOOK, and the MANY WORLDS OF TESLA STRONG. I don't know about the latter two, but the 64-PAGE GIANT was a kick, especially the LITTLE NEMO-esque take on PROMETHEA and the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN board game.

IMAGE COMICS

JACK STAFF VOL. 1: EVERYTHING USED TO BE BLACK & WHITE, by Paul Grist
OCT03 1276, pg. 147, $19.95

This book began life as a UNION JACK revival that Grist pitched to Marvel UK; when they turned it down, Grist filed the serial numbers off the character and published it himself. He then crammed the book with analogues of other British comics characters and TV show heroes from his youth, and formatted it as if they were all the stars of their own strips, which just happened to be intersecting. As an American, I know I'm missing all the allusions and probably most of the jokes, but nevertheless the book stands up as a fun read in its own right. This volume collects all the self-published issues.

MARVEL COMICS

I was looking forward to pummelling the daylights out of whatever comic was reprinted in this month's Marvel Previews, but unfortunately it's CRIMSON DYNAMO, and it's actually not bad. It's busy, sure, and you could object to the comedy stereotyping of Russia (what a country!), but it's a good example of the sort of light-hearted teenage-boy power fantasy that Marvel once specialised in, and could stand to do more of.

It's certainly better than MYSTIQUE #1, the first bonus reprint, was. The art was all right when it comes to settings, but the people came from the Image School of Design, complete with mandatory cheesecake. As for the writing, the plotting was fine - having a shapeshifter for a main character allows Brian Vaughn to trick the reader a time or two - but the dialogue was annoying.

I first encountered Vaughn on Y: THE LAST MAN, and I had the hunch that the lead character's incessant pop culture references were less a stab at characterization than a tic of Vaughn's. My hunch was bolstered by MYSTIQUE, in which characters stand around and recite long passages of STAR WARS or the Rolling Stones at each other in situations that ought to be much too urgent for that. And at one point a guy who once had an unrequited crush on Mystique, and who has a mutant knack for mechanics, says, "I have the power to fix anything... but I couldn't fix her." That's a hard line of dialogue to forgive.

I dwell on MYSTIQUE because it was in the first wave of Marvel's Tsunami initiative. The idea was that those books would be new-reader-friendly, and that they would adopt elements of manga storytelling without aping it outright, so that even if they flopped in the direct market, which most of them have, they'd find an audience in bookstores. Okay, fine. But - and I admit I'm not too qualified to judge on this point - I can't see what distinguishes MYSTIQUE from the bulk of Marvel's line. If there's any manga influence at work here, it has been very craftily concealed. Can Marvel really think that this is what's going to set the bookstore market on fire? If they do, it's a sign that they still don't understand it.

Four whole paragraphs on Marvel? That fills my quota for the year. Let's move on...

AIT/PLANETLAR

GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS, by Stuart Moore and Ryan Kelly
OCT03 2017, pg. 216, $12.95

The geek-bait title disguises, we are told in the ad, "an incisive socio-political satire that skewers the American predilection for global policing", among other things. The premise is that the GRWs of the title have been a staple of the arms race, and now a Middle Eastern country has acquired the technology. Moore was an editor for Vertigo and for Marvel Knights, and Kelly is a regular artist for Vertigo's LUCIFER.

ALTERNATIVE COMICS

8 1/2 GHOSTS, by Rich Tommaso
OCT03 2023, pg. 216, $3.95

A comedy about a struggling horror movie director who is delighted to find that the Victorian mansion he's chosen as a location actually is haunted. Tommaso's work has never seemed distinctive enough to hold my attention before, but this has possibilities.

AVATAR PRESS

THE COURTYARD, by Alan Moore, Antony Johnston & Jacen Burrows
OCT03 2121, pg. 233, $6.95

Collecting the comics adaptation of Moore's Lovecraftian short story. And because this is Avatar, they have to overdo it: there's also a COMPANION (OCT03 2122, pg. 238, $9.95), which includes the original prose story with annotations by a Lovecraft scholar, and a DELUXE HARDCOVER SET (OCT03 2123, pg. 238, 34.95) of both the COMPANION and the comic itself.

DARK HORSE / IMAGE / AVATAR PRESS

Having hit the work-for-hire heights, Mark Millar is now turning to creator-owned work for the first time in a long time, and to ensure that it gets noticed, he's pulling a stunt; he's launching four books from four different publishers all at once, all of which are horror-tinged and thematically linked. (Newsarama has the rundown, with sample pages.)

All I've read of Millar's work was his first AUTHORITY arc, plus that awful JENNY SPARKS miniseries he did, which deterred me from investigating any further. ("Who would believe cities were just great big living battle-suits we just haven't figured out how to operate yet?" "Nobody sane," that's who. Next?) However, publicity about the man is hard to avoid. The impression I've gotten is that Millar's got to the top of his profession by means of one simple, easy, oft-performed trick: taking characters originally intended for the kiddies and making them 'adult'. The thinly-veiled Avengers perform black ops, and gleefully slaughter innocent people until they themselves get slaughtered! Giant-Man beats his wife! And here's Spider-Man's Aunt May as a horny teenager!

I freely admit that this is a prejudice on my part. So let's see - do the new books confirm or confound it?

I was not encouraged to learn that fully three of the titles are superhero comics. RUN, from Image Central, is about a FLASH-type speedster, and promises the startlingly original observation that if people had superpowers in real life they would go kind of mad. It's as if the British Invasion never happened, isn't it? (This is a one-shot, to be followed by others like it, such as POW, "a very, very different way of looking at a superhero sidekick". I'd have thought Rick Veitch in BRATPACK and Evan Dorkin in FIGHT-MAN had the last words on that topic.)

THE CHOSEN, from Dark Horse, is superheroes plus blasphemy, about a pre-teenage kid who discovers he's the second coming of Christ. It's been billed in the British press as "SPIDER-MAN meets the Book of Revelations". And WANTED, from Top Cow, is superheroes plus Mafia. It's been billed in the British press as "WATCHMEN for super-villains". (The British press seems bent on saving Millar the work of thinking up blurbs.) The Previews cover promoting this book blares, "Get ready for superheroes as you've never seen them before!"

This all does nothing for me, not just because it's superheroes but because it's all in the mould of dark takes on kiddie characters. But there's still one last book, THE UNFUNNIES. Does it deviate from the formula?

Ha ha ha ha ha of course not - it's a dark take on funny-animal animated cartoon characters, specifically those from Hanna-Barbera from the look of things.

It's not fair to judge before the books actually come out, but so far, my prejudices remain firmly in place.

CARTOON BOOKS

BONE #55, by Jeff Smith
OCT03 2202, pg. 248, $2.95

After over 10 years, BONE has at last wended its way to a conclusion. And there goes one of the reliable bright spots of the catalogue. Sigh. 48 pages for the regular price.

CHECKER BOOK PUBLISHING GROUP

WINSOR McCAY: EARLY WORKS VOL. 2, by Winsor McCay
OCT03 2227, pg. 252, $19.95

This series collects everything McCay, the first visual genius of the comic strip form, did before LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND, such as his dream strip TALES OF THE RAREBIT FIEND.

DRAWN & QUARTERLY

BERLIN #11, by Jason Lutes
OCT03 2371, pg. 279, $3.50

Another of the annual candidates for Best Comics You're Not Reading. BERLIN is a cross-section of the Weimar Republic in the beginning stages of decay. Lutes is a masterful storyteller - it's no wonder that he's a favourite of Scott McCloud - and BERLIN is superbly controlled comics. Essential.

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS

ROMANCE WITHOUT TEARS, edited by John Benson
OCT03 2440, pg. 300, $22.95

A collection of some of the best of the '50s romance comics. The title is meant to combat the cliché image of the sobbing, weak-willed female that painter Roy Lichtenstein helped make synonymous with the genre.

FOODBOY, by Carol Swain
OCT03 2442, pg. 300, $9.95

Swain's a British cartoonist, and I don't know if she's been confining her cartoon work to that side of the pond, but here in the States she's not been heard from since her last books for Fantagraphics, WAY OUT STRIPS and INVASION OF THE MIND SAPPERS, back in the mid-'90s. FOODBOY is what I suppose you'd call a graphic novella, set in a Welsh village, about two lifelong friends, one of whom gets spooked by a travelling troupe of Evangelists and runs off to live in the woods. Although his chum tries to leave food out for him (hence the title), he grows "increasingly feral."

If this is anything like WAY OUT STRIPS, it will be depressing as hell. In one of that book's main stories, a young woman returns to her small hometown, only to discover that her best friend from school, whose smarts she'd always looked up to, has joined with the rest of the locals in beating up itinerant hippies. In the end, for the sake of fellowship, she joins them too. In another story the devil makes an appearance, and it turns out that he's a depressive slacker named Brian. The overall mood is bleak, dialogue is terse, and it will not surprise you to learn that a good chunk of the stories took place in pubs. It plays a bit like a cross between Adrian Tomine and Charles Burns.

The solicitation refers to Swain's "exquisite panel compositions", which is a bit diplomatic. The compositions are indeed fine, but the actual drawing isn't that accomplished. She draws in charcoal, which doesn't lend itself to nuanced linework, and all her characters look alike, with the same fixed grimace, as if the skin on their faces has been pulled taut.

Still, if you're looking for comics fiction that's understated but not mundane, you'll want to give this a look.

MANIAC KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!, by Richard Sala
OCT03 2443, pg. 300, $16.95

A selection by Sala of his favourite stories from three of his out-of-print books. Sala specializes in the kind of black humour/goofy horror that always gets him comparisons to Charles Addams and Edward Gorey, though these aren't really on the nose. What he's really like is your favorite B-movie, if it were really as good as you remember it being.

Pamphlet round-up: Charles Burns' exquisitely beautiful horror comic about teens in the '70s, BLACK HOLE, reaches its penultimate issue (#11, OCT03 2445, pg. 300, $4.95). And then it gets parodied by gross-out king Johnny Ryan in ANGRY YOUTH COMIX #6 (OCT03 2444, pg. 300, $3.50). Meanwhile, in NAUGHTY BITS #39 (OCT03 2447, pg. 300, $3.50), Bitchy Bitch, Roberta Gregory's signature character, appears to have mammaria dentata.

THE COMICS JOURNAL #258
OCT03 2446, pg. 300, $6.95

This month's feature subject: SPIDER-MAN co-creator and artist, and reclusive Randian crank, Steve Ditko.

LAST GASP

THE COMPLETE DIRTY LAUNDRY COMIX, by R Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Sophie Crumb
OCT03 2565, pg. 330, $16.95

Collects all the collaborative autobiographical efforts of Ma & Pa Crumb, with an occasional cameo by their daughter. See, revealed in minute detail, Robert's permanent despondency and sexual sadistic streak, and Aline's kvetchiness and wildly oscillating ego, and wonder why neither of them has yet strangled the other. Aline can't and couldn't draw, especially early on (the first of these strips are from 1974), but there's something about the crudeness of her style that seems to energize Bob, so it works out. This is the softcover edition, coming a mere decade after the original hardcover.

NBM

THE MAGIC FLUTE: THE P CRAIG RUSSELL LIBRARY OF OPERA ADAPTATIONS, VOL 1, by P. Craig Russell
OCT03 2597, pg. 333, $17.95

The softcover edition. Russell's opera adaptations are unfailingly gorgeous, and THE MAGIC FLUTE, one of the silliest operas ever written, must have given Russell ample space to exercise his gift for comedy. You can see sample pages here.

RUMBLE GIRLS VOL. 1: SILKY WARRIOR TANSIE, by Lea Hernandez
OCT03 2596, pg. 333, $9.95

More giant robots, of a sort; set in the not-too-distant future, this is a satire of reality TV (Hernandez started it in 2000, before everybody and their dogs had satirized reality TV), in which contestants battle wearing robotic exosuits. Of course, in the tradition of pro wrestling, the whole thing, including the backstage intrigue, is scripted by the suits (literally - Hernandez draws them as just empty suits, which is a clever touch) at the giant entertainment conglomerate that owns the show. The lead character, a young, gifted but undisciplined girl named Raven, is initially brought in as a foil to the star, but hasty rewriting is necessitated as she unexpectedly starts becoming a star herself.

I read the first few issues, and I'll admit that I had some trouble following it - partly because there are a lot of ideas to absorb at once in the set-up, but also because Hernandez has a sometimes-sketchy manga-derived drawing style, and I haven't got a grounding in manga.

You can see some preview pages for yourself at NBM's website. This book collects all the Image-published issues, and the final issue, which hasn't been published before.

NEW FLAME PUBLISHING

THE DROWNERS #1 (of 4), by Nabiel Kanan
SEP03 2433, pg. 320, $2.95

NOW AND THEN, by Nabiel Kanan
OCT03 2622, pg. 335, $2.95

I missed it last month, but it seems Nabiel Kanan is self-publishing again. (Kanan comes highly recommended - the enlightened retailers at Page 45 call him "the king of British comicbook fiction.") THE DROWNERS is a miniseries about a media tycoon with a horrible secret. NOW AND THEN is a one-shot, the bulk of which seems to be a middle-aged family man having a reverie on vacation, but also includes "'Crock 'N' Roll,' Kanan's satire on the music scene of the 1980s."

ONI PRESS

COURTNEY CRUMRIN IN THE TWILIGHT KINGDOM #1 (of 4), by Ted Naifeh
OCT03 2624, pg. 336, $2.99

New CRUMRIN miniseries. (Courtney is a crabby little girl with insufferable yuppie parents who had the good fortune to move in with her necromancer great uncle.) These books are attractive and very well spoken of, and I like what I've seen of them.

TOP SHELF PRODUCTIONS

THE MIRROR OF LOVE, by Alan Moore & Jose Villarrubia
Hardcover: OCT03 2748, pg. 354, $24.95

Says the solicitation: "This epic poem recounts the history of same-sex love, revealing a hidden side of Western culture through the lives of its greatest artists". Moore originally wrote it in protest of Clause 28, a reprehensible piece of Thatcher-era legislation (I suppose that's redundant) banning the use of government funds to "promote" homosexuality. Moore was so exorcised over the issue that he helped assemble an anthology called AARGH (short for Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), where THE MIRROR OF LOVE originally appeared, and published it himself through his short-lived company Mad Love. He also mentions Clause 28 in his sulphurous introduction to V FOR VENDETTA.

In its original form it was only eight pages long. Here it's been bulked out with "over forty full-color plates from acclaimed artist Jose Villarrubia", plus a foreword by Robert Rodi (who gave the work its glowing review in The Comics Journal), an introduction by David Drake, and reference guides to artists, places, books and poems mentioned in the text. I know Villarrubia from his digitally-altered-photo comics section in Moore's PROMETHEA #7, but that was enough to knock me out - it's about the only successful fumetti I've ever seen.

Reviews for THE MIRROR OF LOVE, so far, have been nothing short of rapturous. You can read the original script here.

MAGAZINES

COMIC ART #5
OCT03 2843, pg. 373, $9

I still can't recommend this highly enough. This issue includes "a lengthy studio visit with Art Spiegelman, including a great deal of previously unpublished art," an interview with Kim Deitch (BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS), and "a major career survey of Crocket Johnson of BARNABY fame".

Chris Ekman is a political cartoonist.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.